“I hope you don’t mind Ruth coming to the movies, Tony? My stepmother’s out of town.”
“I can cover three tickets.” Tony smiled at the tall blond girl in her yellow summer dress, she smiled at him, and Ian could see the heat there, plain as day.
Something about this chase, he thought. It’s throwing us all off-balance. He went back disquieted, to take over the dawn watch on Kolb from Nina, then attack their list of telephone calls. But by the following afternoon when Tony came home from his shift at the antiques shop, disquiet was forgotten.
“CHEERS,” IAN SAID to his team. “We’ve unraveled our first thread.”
The three of them stood around the table, looking down at the list.
“Seven of these addresses are fakes,” Ian said. “No pattern to it, they’re mixed in with the real ones. But Riley Antiques in Pittsburgh, Huth & Sons in Woonsocket, Rhode Island . . .” He rattled off the rest. “Not one of them is real.”
“What’s on the other end when you dialed those numbers?” Tony asked.
“All private residences.” Sometimes a woman had answered the telephone, sometimes a man, in one case a child’s treble. But not one person at the end of the line had been anything other than puzzled when Ian asked about the business named on the list. “I heard at least three German accents, as well. And when I asked the operator to find me the number of the business, she told me there was no Huth & Sons in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, or anywhere else in Rhode Island for that matter. Same with the others. Those businesses do not exist.” Ian could feel his heart clipping along in staccato pleasure, the thrill when tedious legwork finally produced a lead.
Tony gnawed a thumbnail. “Was anyone on the other end suspicious?”
“Some sounded flustered. One rang off on me. Mostly I pleaded a wrong number and rang off myself in a hurry.”
Nina hadn’t said anything at all. But her eyes glittered, and as Ian looked from her to Tony, he felt the same electric charge leaping between the three of them.
Seven addresses. Die Jägerin might be living at one of them.
“Car or train?” Ian asked. “We’ve got a few day-trips ahead of us.”
“BLOODY HELL . . .” Ian looked around a sea of unfamiliar street signs, pulling over with a squeal of some very dodgy brakes. Tony had taken the train to Queens to see a cousin and come back in a rusty Ford on loan. “Hand me that map, Nina.”
Nina rummaged for it, sharp white teeth crunching through the skin of a beet. She ate raw beets like apples, until her teeth were pink. Ian hoped they wouldn’t be pulled over by any policemen questioning his tendency to drift to the correct (i.e., English) side of the road, because the woman at Ian’s side looked like a small blond cannibal. “You’re holding the map upside-down, comrade. Some navigator you are.”
“I navigate skies filled with stars,” Nina said huffily, “not places called Woonsocket.”
“I am never getting in an airplane with you, so kindly start learning to navigate in two dimensions rather than three.”
“Mat tvoyu cherez sem’vorot s prisvistom.”
“Leave my mother out of this.”
It had been a two-hour drive between Boston and their first target, with Tony staying behind to cover the tail on Kolb. Nina had spent most of the drive telling Ian how she’d left the Soviet Union, flying into Poland two steps ahead of an arrest warrant before running into Sebastian. American road maps might be a mystery, but Ian was getting a feel for how to navigate the minefield that was his wife: ask anything about Lake Rusalka or what happened there with die Jägerin, or display any sign of affection whatsoever, and she either lapsed into prickly silence or detonated outright. But she didn’t mind telling him about Seb, and Ian stored her affectionate stories up like coins. New memories of his little brother, every one priceless . . . but now it was time to work.
The Ford soon coasted into a quiet suburb with green yards and bicycles lying in driveways. Number twelve was a small yellow house with a modest, lovingly tended garden. It most certainly wasn’t an antiques shop named “Huth & Sons.” Seeing it here, so plainly a residence and not a business, made Ian’s pulse pick up. Someone who was not who they were supposed to be lived here.
Nina had fallen silent too, thrumming like a plucked wire. He drove past number twelve